Mandalay, whose construction began in 1857 as the capital of Upper Burma north of the British colonial border, became home to King Mindon’s splendid court two years later. With its lively urban economicindustrial trading and development activities, the city came to symbolise the revolt by the last Burmese Buddhist rulers against colonialism.

The investigation of the little researched city of Mandalay proved, like the onslaught of the apocalyptic horsemen bringing war and pestilence in their wake, to be ill-fated by the double star of the coronavirus pandemic and the military coup. The observations in this essay therefore focus predominantly on the city’s early period, ultimately posing the question of whether royal Mandalay might serve as a guideline for understanding present-day politics in Myanmar.

Mandalay: Bulwark against Colonialism follows on the heels of an account of Yangon (2017) and an approach to Naypyitaw (2018, 2019) – a trilogy spotlighting the three capitals on the territory of Myanmar as urban figures in which historical epochs of upheaval and the political-economic regimes of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries played out.

Autoreninfo

Autoreninfo

Heinz Schütte, geb. 1937 in Dortmund, ist Soziologe und lebt in Paris. In seinen ethno-historischen Arbeiten mit Schwerpunkt Südostasien unternimmt er den Versuch, die Welt durch die Augen der Fremden zu sehen: Der Forschende bringt sich als Lernender in die jeweilige Gesellschaft ein und erkennt im kulturell Anderen letztlich die Möglichkeit des eigenen Ich – hehres Ziel einer kaum je erreichbaren Symbiose des Verstehens.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Table of contents (PDF)

Leseprobe

Leseprobe

Prologue (PDF)

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Weiterempfehlen